After attending Islamia College in Peshawar, Raza Tahir-Kheli read Physics at Oriel College, University of Oxford, in 1955 and completed his Ph.D. there in 1962. He served as a Research Associate-Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, from 1962 to 1964, prior to working at the Nuclear Science Laboratory in Islamabad for a two-year period. In 1966 be became an Assistant Professor of Physics at Temple University, where he subsequently served as an Associate Professor (1968-1970) and Professor (1970-2011).
Other short-term appointments include two sabbaticals at the Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford; Royal Society Visiting Professor in 1982; Professeur de Echange, Centre Scientifique d'Orsay, France; Visiting Professor, Institute Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France; Part Sabbatical at Max-Planck Institut für Physik and at the Department of Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara.
Raza Tahir-Kheli was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007. Currently, he serves as a Professor Emeritus at Temple University.